Even before the One was unveiled, OnePlus has been in constant news for all the right and wrong reasons. One of the reasons why so many people are interested in buying the handset, even though it is hard to get your hands on one, is because of its low price-point, which even gives Google’s Nexus line-up of devices a run for their money. OnePlus has already explained that they don’t intend to make a profit for the first two years, which allows them to offer the One for so cheap. Along with this, the company has also managed to keep its costs down by dramatically cutting down on its marketing expenses and selling the OnePlus One directly. If they had taken the traditional course of selling their devices via retailers, the final price of the device would have been easily higher by around 20-40%. But money is not unlimited, right? What if the company runs out of money before that? How do they exactly plan on making a profit? On this matter, Carl said that the company will not run out of money in the next couple of years and is still thinking of various ways to make money. This includes selling accessories for their devices, where they have kept a reasonable profit margin. Other possible options that would be viable down the line are an increase in scale, which would dramatically drive down the component cost for OnePlus devices, allowing the company to make a small profit on every unit sold and providing software services to users. In the end though, Carl states that making money is not the company’s prime motivator. Instead, they are using the Silicon Valley startup approach here and are first creating a great product that will automatically attract customers and then find a way to earn money off them later on.
